I don't stretch. I used to. I don't at all now. My range of motion is no less than it was when I did. I spent a year with a physical therapist. She increased my height by an inch or so by getting me to stand up straight (long story short) but she never told me to stretch.

I do engage in regular physical activity. Perhaps the most important thing I can say is that your teens was about shit you did for your parents, your twenties was about shit you did to impress dates, and your thirties is where you start doing shit for you. There are things that you've done your whole life that may have started out for someone else but now they're yours. Own 'em. I've been running since I was thirteen years old. I have maintained that I hate running ever since. Maybe 39 or so is where i realized that I actually kinda like it.

Any physical activity you take up now will not get you mocked by the kids. They'll enthusiastically approve of you trying something new. Especially if you are willing and able to be thoroughly outclassed by people half your age.

30-something is where you should seriously give earnest thought to no longer attempting to impress anyone else. Wear what the fuck you want, eat what the fuck you want, go to the bars you like not the ones you're supposed to be seen in.

I posted that at 38. I needed permission to do what I wanted to do. That permission was not necessary then, I just didn't know it yet.

Friends? Anybody you reach out to will be thankful. People in their 30s cease to have the time or patience to have friends for some reason. So they get lonely. So if you make a habit of saying "hey whassup" you will find yourself with a whole bunch of earnest friends. All it takes is the effort to connect.

Don't let yourself fossilize in the culture. You're about to hit the point where the grocery store has music from your childhood. This does not mean the music from your childhood is cool, it means you are finally economically powerful enough that the marketers are willing to fellate your nostalgia. There's new music out there. Listen to it. There's new books out there. Read them. There's new television out there. It's mostly shit but it's worth figuring it out for yourself so you don't become one of those choads that shares '90s_kid memes on Facebook.

You don't have to use all the new technology and websites and apps out there but if you don't have a passing knowledge of any of this stuff you've officially become one of those crusty old fucks that thinks Jay Leno is funny. Your instinct will be to go "Tik Tok? In my day we had Friendster! And we liked it! We loved it! Change is bad! The world was a better place when I was your age! Youth is wasted on the young!" but your instincts wanted you to have a kid at 17 raise it to 34 and then get eaten by a mastodon or some shit so it's time to start second-guessing your instincts.

And always remember that whatever you do, however you do it, someone somewhere will disapprove. They are every bit as powerless over your life as your parents are so accord them the same level of respect.

30-something is where you should seriously give earnest thought to no longer attempting to impress anyone else. Wear what the fuck you want, eat what the fuck you want, go to the bars you like not the ones you're supposed to be seen in.

I was going to ask you if you thought this was hormones. But it's not. I spent way too much time trying to fit in with the squares. It's a kind of survival mechanism because subconsciously you're terrified of what's going to happen to you once you become an adult and get to the "real world" so you feel a need to conform to what "the world" is, or at least seems to be. And conformity is good. The English language, aqueducts, shit like that. But "the world" is only as big as you can perceive.

People are only going to get as far as their own brains can take them. Due to the institutional separation between "youth" and "adulthood" there's a constant tension. You're moving through time on a cart. Your social existence is segregated by age group. You don't want to be cast out. You still mostly think about your "future" not "the present", even though you're technically living in the present. You peruse Wikipedia articles of famous people who died before you were born and try to look for a path. It takes a minute to begin trusting your own perceptions of the world.

So you get dumped into people. You have "friends" but you're constantly trying to distance yourself from them even if they love you. You want to wear what you want but again, you're not sure if "being yourself" is going to fuck up your survival strategy. You have fun but it's too much fun. You need to let loose because you're being too uptight now. Human existence is bouncing between these extremes. There's no flow.

I'm convinced eventually this ends not through some God-like level of insight but just out of sheer exhaustion. It's never gonna make sense. You love who you love, you're friends with your friends, you like what you like. Then you resent how much time you actually wasted worrying about this trivial shit. So I'm like half your age and I mostly no longer give a fuck what anyone thinks. But maybe I shortened the loop somehow. I nearly got kicked out at 17 and was still trying to impress the squares to get dates. If I was smarter I would have said fuck all that shit, dropped out at 16, flipped off my parents, moved cities out of the bayou, got an apartment, and enrolled at the European University of Lubajub in engineering physics.

And hormones, yes, vulnerability yes, but I blame institutions and basically geography. You can't sheep-herd kids into a square box on a tighter schedule than prison and expect anything better than Lockup Raw. That's why any good parent makes their kid get a fucking job at 16. It's non-linear. Here's ex-convicts, 20-something managers who you would call burnouts and I would call legends, customers throwing shit at you over the counter. Some old guy yelling at you because you won't give him change for $100. It's not trial-by-fire or trying to cure them through anti-fragility. It's diversity. It's leaving the playpen. It's exiting the cave. It's freedom, it's love, it's humans being honest rather than lying. Here's your first paycheck. You learned to code at 10 so go get some bitcoins with that kiddo. Now you're in the tenth grade and you just committed a felony. The world just got bigger.

Eventually your world gets big enough you start to feel semi-okay about yourself. Now I'm the adult and they're teens. I didn't work there for a bit, but during university I was back, this time managing that pizza joint part-time, still living in the hometown and at some point I went from subordinate to authority figure. The 16 and 17 y/o's look at me with googly eyes. They pay a lot of attention. They think it's crazy I'd ever make a pee-pee joke. They still constantly ask me to go to the washroom, and I give them the "da fuq?" reaction, except I did the same shit.

Their lives are so small. They're so fucking vulnerable. It scares the shit out of me. Which is fucking wild because that used to be me. And my instinct now is dad-mode but I can't. I can't fucking bullshit these kids. Someone has to be honest. So I decided to tell the truth, even if that makes me an asshole. "what were you like in high school?" Oh, I don't know. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, 93 average, toga party, calc, faking a suicide attempt, wbu? "have you ever done acid nil?" And of course they're all on fucking drugs but contrary to popular opinion a) they're good for your soul and b) are less likely to ruin your future than playing video games.

So yeah, people born after 9/11. I keep telling them kids to take Grade 12 Calculus so one day they can retire. No, don't major in fucking business. No, don't take a goddamned year off. Time is important. Your "friend" isn't going to return from his 2 gap years. And his mom is a shit-head. "My son is 17 and donating blood THAT'S A TREND YOU DON'T SEE IN TODAY'S YOUTH", well I did that too after knocking over 12 garbage cans you asshole. Okay, this one kid. CS major. I love you. Yes, computer science is good. Okay, this is an eigenvector. Okay, you're scared shitless but please don't give up. Believe. In. Yourself.

Don't let yourself fossilize in the culture.

I'm probably a better influence on most of these kids than their parents. Because in the end, there's no cure for stupidity. All that shit you mentioned, the terrestrial radio, the Jay Leno skits, the shitting on young people just because they're young, all of that comes from just general small mindedness. You'll never fossilize if you still give a shit, and some people are frozen at 17.

You'll never fossilize if you still give a shit, and some people are frozen at 17.

Dated this girl. Her stepmom had three brothers. One of them had a wife who was pretty hot. Like eight, nine years older than me, but pretty hot. And she'd like to have these "wisdom chats" with me. "when you're older" etc.

One day she was talking about the ruckus and racket of kids and said "you know, once you have kids you no longer listen to music. It's all just a racket and all you want is peace."

She was probably 28 at that point. And I looked at her, and nodded politely, and never really talked to her the same way again because no babe, that isn't getting older. That's all you. I celebrated my 30th birthday in the mosh pit at Ministry, along with a whole bunch of other fogeys who really oughtta have known better.

Something nearly no one understands is that teenagers are a modern invention. As in, "my grandparents didn't go to high school but neither did anyone else their age." My grandmother was giving me grief when I was seventeen because I didn't get to their house until about 9am, therefore I was sleeping in. My grandfather said "lay off the boy when you were his age you were married with two kids." If you're fifteen now, your parents' parents' parents worked the goddamn fields. They didn't worry about the fuckin' fish under the sea dance.

Stretch every day. Before you go to bed, and after you get up. 10 mins. It will change your life.

Also, take a regular yoga class. Once a week, or once a month doesn't matter. Just start doing it NOW.

Getting that internal knowledge of your body, how things work, how things feel, and the detailed knowledge of what is normal in your body, will become INCREDIBLY important as you age.

I'm 50 now. Never had major injuries or surgeries, and have spent a large part of my life being not particularly fit. I have little knowledge of my body outside of what I drape it in... so when the doc asks, "Has it always been like this?" or "How has it changed?" I am completely powerless to tell her.

And, I have learned stuff about how my body SHOULD have worked. Like that my wrists only have about 1/3 of the range of motion that most people's wrists have. If someone wants to pour some nuts into my palm, I have to cup both my palms together... I can't turn my hand so my palm is pointing directly up. So pour nuts in my palm, and they fall off the pinky-finger-side of my palm.

If I had been stretching regularly, doing yoga, whatever, I would have known this was "weird" and was something I needed to focus on when stretching, to keep limber and protect my range of motion over the years.

At 50, I may be able to recover my range of motion, and get back to everyone else's "normal".

I have a large band that I use before my gym training to keep my shoulders warmed up - I do these dislocations methodically and the older powerlifting guys tried it once, only able to get their arms above their heads, couldn't go any further.

Next week they all had a band of their own to work on their shoulder flexibility, it was adorable but also scary that they simply never noticed it until they tried that specific movement.

I’m stretching as I type on the floor. Running is great too. I’m 45 and feeling good because I run. I teach 8th grade math and got In my fastest 5k of the season this morning before my first day with students back.

I didn’t take the time to stretch this morning though and wish I’d had. I expect I would have recovered faster.